White flight

White flight is a colloquial term for the demographic trend of whites moving away from areas with large non-white populations.

General aspects of white flight

Due to the economic boom and growth of suburbia in the years after World War II, whites (a term used broadly to describe people of European heritage) - many of whom were the children and grandchildren of immigrants - began to move away from inner core cities and to newer suburban communities in order to escape the increasing crime and racial tension that plagued inner cities throughout the country. Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, due to racist real-estate covenants and other discriminatory practices, non-white people were often not afforded the same opportunities to move away from the cities, even when they may have been economically able to do so.

As wealthier white residents abandoned the inner city neighborhoods, they ultimately left behind increasingly poor ethnic populations whose neighborhoods rapidly deteriorated, beginning in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s. Jobs and businesses disintegrated along with the neighborhoods and ultimately turned the increasingly poverty-stricken areas into crime-ridden slums with failing and dilapidated public schools.

It should be noted that several predominantly poorer white communities also face conditions similar to those of areas that have experienced white flight. The cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls in New York serve as prime examples. In these areas, manufacturing jobs were once dominant but have now largely disappeared, resulting in urban decay.

White flight around the world

In addition to the United States, many cities in the United Kingdom, including parts of London, have also been affected by white flight, especially after South Asian, West Indian, and African immigrants first began arriving in that country in significant numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. The phenomenon is also to be found in South African cities, most notably Johannesburg and Durban, which saw a mass influx of African people into the inner cities during the final years of Apartheid, and the fleeing of white people to the suburbs (or out of the country).

White flight in the U.S.

In the United States, the ethnic groups that follow Whites are African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.

It has been taking place in many American cities and even regions, especially in the Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western sections of the United States since the 1950s.

The effects of white flight have been significant for the cities that have been hit by this phenomenon, especially Detroit, Michigan and St. Louis, Missouri, which lost more than half of their 1950 peak populations due largely to white flight. In New York City many whites have moved from parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn to suburban Staten Island. Other US cities that have been noticeably affected by white flight include the West and South Sides of Chicago, Illinois, Cleveland, Ohio, the Greater Los Angeles Area (Compton, Inglewood, etc.), Newark, New Jersey, and numerous smaller cities.

Schools and busing

White flight has also affected education. The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education ordered the desegregation of schools. American cities affected by white flight also witnessed growing disparities in the quality of education. Thus, to achieve racial balance and equality in schools, the Court subsequently mandated in the 1971 decision of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education controversial school busing to mainly all-white schools in the suburbs. Begininning from the mid 1970s, many minority students - especially Africans - were transported across long distances from the poorer core cities to the newer affluent suburbs. As Justice William Douglas observed in his dissent in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), "The inner core of Detroit is now rather solidly black; and the blacks, we know, in many instances are likely to be poorer ..."

In turn, busing and desegregation orders in education have in some cases led to a further, non-geographical white flight, one out of the public school systems which are subject to desegregation orders and into private schooling. For instance, in 1970 when a federal court ordered desegregation of the public schools in Pasadena, California, the proportion of white students in those schools reflected the proportion of whites in the community, 54 percent and 53 percent, respectively. Although staying in place geographically, after the desegregation process began large numbers of whites in the upper and middle classes who could afford it pulled their children from the public schools and placed them into private schools instead. As a result, by 2004 Pasadena was home to sixty-three private schools, which educated one-third of all school-aged children in the city, and the proportion of white students in the public schools had fallen to 16 percent. The superintendent of Pasadena's public schools characterized them as being to whites "like the bogey-man," and mounted policy changes and a publicity drive to induce affluent whites to put their children back into the public schools.

White flight since the 1980s

White flight continues in some areas to the present day but has taken on a new trend as some of the older suburbs have been experiencing urban decay similar to their parent cities, such as in some of the southern and western suburbs of Chicago adjacent to the city. East St. Louis and many of the neighboring communities on the Illinois side of the St. Louis metropolitan area have also long suffered from urban decay with the decline of the manufacturing industries that had once powered the economies of the region.

In general, the only whites who tend to remain in cities and suburbs affected by white flight are low-income whites (though many low-income whites in East Coast cities have moved to close-in, working-class suburbs or other, more heavily white neighborhoods within the same city) and senior citizens (especially "empty nesters"), who have often lived in a particular community for a very long time. Usually, when these seniors die or move to retirement communities, the process of white flight is complete.

However, the population decline of some Midwestern, Northeastern, and Western cities has either slowed down or even reversed, while other areas remain economically devastated due to seemingly-permanent economic shifts and job losses. The future of this trend remains to be seen.

White flight in Southern California

The forces and groups involved in white flight in Southern California are distinct from those in other areas due to the region's demography and history.

Many whites once lived in urban neighborhoods in Los Angeles before departing the city in large numbers after the 1965 Watts Riots (a trend that actually began before the riots but accelerated after them). Major riots in Detroit in 1967 and during the following year, after the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., contributed to white flight in that city. Now, the city of Detroit is over 80% black whereas a majority of its neighboring suburbs, such as Livonia and Warren, are predominantly white.[1]. Similarly, after the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, large numbers of white Californians left Southern California or left the state entirely. The phenomenon has affected not only the central city basin, but also the suburban regions of the San Fernando Valley and the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California, where many working-class Hispanics and lower to upper middle class Asian Americans have moved during much of the 1980s and 1990s.

Some of the people leaving the Los Angeles havemoved to other states. Many of these ex-Californians ended up settling in the Rocky Mountain States of Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, where their presence has greatly altered the local political landscape in favor of the United States Republican Party (see red states). [2]

Gentrification: the opposite of white flight

The opposing social trend of wealthy social groups moving into an inner city area and displacing the existing residents is called gentrification. In Cleveland, as reported on the Jim Lehrer NewsHour on PBS in 2003, several wealthy gay and lesbian couples have purchased and restored homes in the predominantly African neighborhoods. In other cases, some inner city areas may witness a renaissance as a home for artists, which happens to be the case with the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles. In Montreal many inner city areas have been gentrified by the usual Yuppie couples but also by "empty nesters", that is, couples in their late forties or fifties whose children have left their home, giving them an incentive to sell their large house in the suburbs and buy a condominium or townhouse in the inner city, close to the better parks, the leisure activities, the cultural attractions and the convenience of the Montreal metro.